hi,
On Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 12:29:50AM +0200, Dirk Dettmering wrote:
> Hello,
>
> two weeks ago I tried to upgrade the command rpms on a small server in
> my institute but during rpm -Fvh the machine crashed. Afterwards I
> couldn't boot anymore because of severe errors on the root partition.
> I couldn't repair the partition in single user mode because the
> fileutils especially xfs_repair were completly broken. So I booted
Were you part way through installing new XFS rpms when you crashed?
That might explain why the commands were trashed (right?).
> from the 1.0.1 install cd and repaired the partition and used
> xfs_repair several times. Afterwards I replaced all files from the
> command rpms with the manually extracted files from the new rpms which
> I tried to upgrade.
>
> These are the now by rpm -qa reported versions of the command rpms:
> xfsprogs-devel-1.2.7-0
> xfsprogs-1.3.1-pre1
This is very old & moldy, probably from cvs right? (these "pre" rpms
were never "released") - I would upgrade at least this, and probably
everything XFS related in your userspace.
> xfsdump-1.0.11-0
> acl-1.0.8-0
> acl-devel-1.0.8-0
>
> ...[snip]...
>
> But the problem with the partition didn't vanish completly but instead
> I got some really strange errors. Every two or three days some files
> on that partition were missing and every time I had to boot to single
> user mode run xfs_repair and then I could copy over the missing files.
> But today I got several kernel oops during normal operation and I
> couldn't copy the files over as fast as they disapeared. After copying
> the missing files sometimes the affected files show up two or three
> times in the directory when using ls!
> I've attached a file with the output of ls -il in two of the affected
> directories.
>
> When the first crash during the update of the command rpms happend,
> the kernel was 2.4.6 with the non-cvs xfs-patch for this version. Last
Which version of gcc did you use to compile this kernel?
You will probably get best results with egcs-2.91.66.
> week I updated the kernel to 2.4.8-pre4 cause I had the hope to get
> away with the filesystem trouble:
> Linux pc16154.pharmazie.uni-marburg.de 2.4.8-pre4-xfs #1 Die Aug 7
> 17:06:15 CEST 2001 i586 unknown
>
> If you wonder why I havn't reinstalled the machine already that's
> because I didn't have time to do it 'till now. But since today the
> problem have become so serious that I have to reinstall the machine
> tomorrow morning (CEST). If someone wants more information I will be
If you are looking for stability, I wouldn't recommend following
the 2.4.X releases as you seem to have been - try the stable XFS
releases (ie. 1.0.1).
>
> Dirk
>
> P.S.: I'm still happy with xfs! ;-) I have it running on two other
> machines without any hassle (but I used only the official kernel rpms
> from 1.0 and 1.0.1, 2.4.2 and 2.4.5 on both) and had never any problem
> with my SGI O2 in nearly five years!
>
that's good to hear.
> P.P.S.: Should I update the command rpms in single user mode or is it
> okay to do it during normal operation?
I'm not sure that'll make much difference - there will always be
a chance that a crash will happen during an upgrade and that is
likely to be disastrous no matter which runlevel you're at.
Hope this helps.
cheers.
--
Nathan
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